The Hosting Benefits of Webmail

For both hosts and website administrators, having an efficient way to communicate with others concerning all things related to their sites is important. This stands true whether it concerns potential business partners, clients, those bringing technical issues to attention, or people just commenting on your business or hosted sites.

Third party webmail services have the benefit of not requiring you to have to save all the information to your hard drive, thus saving you disk space. Being able to efficiently communicate using a simplified user interface is a must for anyone involved with hosting services. It’ll save you time and precious resources.

Unlike Email, Webmail services can also be accessed from anywhere a web browser and the Internet are available.

Besides being offered by themselves, many different hosting providers offer several types of webmail capabilities for their customers through their hosting packages.

Having a good webmail service that fits your specific needs helps any host or webmaster properly moderate his or her business or hosted sites. It’s also important to note that most of these third party clients now have easy to use mobile apps, whether they’re for Android or iOS.

Here, we examine some of the benefits and differences of 3 common third party webmail providers including Squirrel Mail, RoundCube, and Horde.

Squirrel Mail Cost: Free

First we have Squirrel Mail. It’s free and supports the majority of platforms. It’s a common webmail service that’s been around since 1999. Using HTML4, this Open Source service is compatible with the majority of web browsers.

Using plugins can help you customize your webmail service to fit your specific needs. Squirrel Mail features over 200.

Some of the useful plugins offered by Squirrel Mail are as follows: Bug Report, Reply Buttons, Secure Login, Server Settings, Download All. You can view an entire list at Squirrel Mails official site.

Also, some interesting facts about Squirrel Mail: It’s used by the Prime Minister’s office in India (India’s government cited it as more secure than Outlook). It was also featured in the movie The Social Network as being used by Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker.

RoundCube Cost: Free

Next we have RoundCube. Being PHP, it supports databases such as MYSQL, Postgre, and SQLite.

RoudCube is offered by top hosting companies including HostGator, Media Temple, DreamHost, and a lot of others.

Specifically designed for servers such as Apache and Lighttpd, RoundCube is available in 67 languages. It’s also capable of connecting to IMAPv4 servers.

A great feature of RoundCube is its drag and drop management of messages. In the future, RoundCube plans to make its address book based on VCard.

Like Squirrel Mail, Roundcube also features many plugins. Such examples include: Autologin, Import Messages, Captcha, Drag and Upload, Taskbar.

An interesting note, RoundCube is used as an email service at universities including Harvard and UC Berkeley.

Horde Cost: Free

Lastly we have Horde. Horde’s email service is based within Horde’s larger application framework.

It’s PHP-based as well and includes support for cPanel. It includes standard webmail features such as address book, calendar, and notes. It also features a newsreader and filter.

With the service, Horde offers an efficient mail filtering frontend known as Ingo, saving users from having to deal with unwanted messages.